The black met his voiceless end.

                                                     Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

We are forced to stare at the thick curtain formed by lack of specific evidence. Yet if we go on something of a diet concerning data and become patient with very small and occasionally uncertain portions, we may learn something.  

Winthrop Jordan, Tumult and Silence at Second Creek, An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy (1992)

These two epigraphs convey pithily the means and scope of our project on the 1741 New York slave conspiracy as well as the dilemmas we must contend with as students of a slave conspiracy. The first epigraph is from Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno, a fictional interpretation of a real-life slave rebellion in 1805 on board the ship The Tryal. The importance of Benito Cereno to our project is twofold: Meville’s story is the model par excellence of a creative response to the archive of American slave conspiracy; it is also paradigmatic of the archive itself, in the sense that the only available account of the slave rebellion is the testimony of the white Spanish captain Benito Cereno; much of our knowledge about slave conspiracies derives from primary documents authored by prejudiced white authorities. Contrastingly, the end of the chief slave conspirator Babo in Benito Cereno is ‘voiceless’, a silence which is representative of the wordlessness of slave conspirators in the historical record.

The second epigraph, from Winthrop Jordan’s history of an 1861 slave conspiracy at Second Creek, metaphorizes the archive, with its lacunae and distortions, as a ‘thick curtain’. Certainly, obscurity is something which every scholar in the field must confront. Significantly, the Jordan epigraph also posits a (modest) solution to this epistemological dilemma. Although we cannot know all, or even most things, about slave conspiracies, we may at least learn something. And that something may be meaningful, as we hope to demonstrate in our critical, fictional, filmic and musical engagements with the 1741 New York slave conspiracy.

In recent years the work of historians such as Winthrop Jordan, Jill Lepore and Michael P. Johnson has shown there is considerable cause for scepticism regarding the occurrence of slave conspiracies, due to the fact that much of our knowledge about them derives from primary documents authored by prejudiced white authorities. Moreover, it has been shown that American courts incentivised elaborate confession, whether false or not, with the promise of an acquittal or a commuted sentence. In the case of the 1741 New York conspiracy, the plot, as constructed by Daniel Horsmanden in his Journal, was highly formulaic, raising the question of whether the conspiracy “was merely the awful product of [his] anguished imagination” (Lepore 13). These are just three examples of the plethora of doubts that have been raised about the actuality of numerous slave conspiracies, casting suspicion on even such famous cases as the rebellion of Denmark Vesey. The problem with these epistemological morasses is that one might be tempted to misbelieve in many slave conspiracies. Such scepticism risks erasing the traces of courageous resistance against slavery and, inadvertently, reverting to the U. P. Phillip’s view of slavery as a benign institution, with resistance an unusual and infrequent occurrence.

Furthermore, rebels against slavery, such as Vesey, whose leadership of the 1822 Charleston slave conspiracy Johnson is sceptical about, hold an exalted place in the history of African-American resistance. Casting doubt on the existence of their plots has no small implications for contemporary black politics. With the ascendancy of the Trump administration and its majoritarian biases, we need our historical role models of resistance.  Clearly, new strategies are required in approaching a corrupt historical archive. One valuable tactic is to corroborate unreliable primary documents with supporting documents, something which Lepore achieves skilfully in New York Burning by reading Daniel Horsmanden’s Journal alongside George Clarke’s manuscript copies of the trial minutes to verify events. Nonetheless, it is our contention that Lepore, despite her sincere attempt “to find out more about [the alleged slave conspirators] than their names and fates” (233), devotes far too much attention to Daniel Horsmanden. This disproportionate attention, which is seen also in the scholarship around Nat Turner’s confessions concerning Thomas Gray, is surely due to the fact that considerably more trustworthy data survives about the prosecuting authorities than about the slave conspirators. However, this archival dilemma faces every student of slave conspiracy. The question at hand is, how can we attempt to overcome this asymmetry? How can we foreground the men and women who struggled against the punishing edifice of slavery?

One strategy might be to turn our attention from narratives of grand rebellion to humbler acts of everyday resistance. Although the eminent historian Herbert Aptheker deemed everyday resistance, or ‘individual’ resistance as he termed it, to be inferior to ‘collective’ forms of resistance, rebellion and conspiracies are often hard to verify historically, as has been shown in the work of Jordan, Johnson and Lepore. In the case of the 1741 New York conspiracy we have found everyday acts of resistance easier to verify. Not only are they more verifiable, but as Robin D. G. Kelley, historian of black working-class opposition in the Jim Crow South, contends, “the submerged social and cultural worlds of oppressed people frequently surface in everyday forms of resistance” (77). Kelley’s articulation points the way to a scholarly strategy which may help to decenter white officials in favour of slaves. Accordingly, we have chosen to explore an act of everyday resistance in colonial New York in the hope that we might learn something about the world of the city’s almost two thousand black residents. This act of everyday resistance is the formation of the Geneva Club.

The Geneva Club was born of a theft. On the night of January 27, 1738, three slaves, named Cuffee, Caesar and Prince, robbed several barrels of Geneva liquor (gin) from Baker’s tavern. To commemorate their success, they christened themselves the Geneva Club. Lepore speculates that “they may have hidden their takings in John Hughson’s house; in 1738, he lived on Dock Street, just a few blocks away from Baker, and was already notorious for “entertaining Slaves” (99). The following night, Saturday, January 28, the men of the Geneva Club were arrested. With no trial necessary, the next Thursday the slaves were paraded through the streets of New York on a cart and whipped at every corner. Allegedly, Cuffee, as he was brought to the whipping-post, cried out, Make Room for a Free MASON” (102).

Adopting scepticism, we might doubt the existence of the Geneva Club, due to the fact that a conflation of black thieves and white freemasons served the political ends of the ruling Court Party. The New York lodge of freemasons was strongly associated with the rival Country Party. Indeed, the Court Party capitalized on the robbery, publishing in William Bradford’s New York Gazette “an account of the “Dishonourable Society of Black Masons” …aimed at the city’s white Masons.” (Lepore 100) However, we should note that in the Country Party’s riposte to the Gazette article, published in the Weekly Journal, the author did not so much deny the truth of the claims as chastise them for impropriety, calling the satire “downright Bawdy” (101). Furthermore, in another attack, the Gazette’s correspondent asserted that his essay was only partly satire since what he reported was essentially true (102), “for it is sufficiently known in this City, that as one of this black Guard was brought down to receive his Punishment, he was so impudent as to cry out, Make Room for a Free MASON” (102). Hereafter, there was no rebuttal from the Weekly Journal.

This exchange of letters is a tentative basis for confirming the formation of the Geneva Club. More robust as evidence is the testimony of the slave Fortune made to the court on May 29, 1741. According to Clarke’s manuscript copies of the trial minutes, Fortune testified, “that the Prisoners had asked him to go to Husons house where they frolick’d often, but remembering the free Masons club who were punished for meeting he decline it and did not go there” (99). This remark was deleted by Daniel Horsmanden when he prepared the testimony for publication in 1742. However, it is crucial in substantiating the Geneva Club as a form of black freemasonry.  

Now it is worth detailing now why we chose to explore the Geneva Club rather than any other act of resistance. We could have easily delved into Caesar and Prince’s robbery of Rebecca Hogg’s shop in 1741, a case which raises important questions about mixed race sexual relations and the economic freedoms possible within bondage. However, the Geneva Club is exceptional in being an example of aesthetically-minded everyday resistance, a fascinating blend of theft and mimicry. According to Simon Gikandi, aesthetic play was crucial in transforming slaves from chattel into subjects. In his book Slavery and the Culture of Taste, he considers whether the performance of a counterculture of taste helped to recuperate of existential freedom for enslaved peoples, a crucial question when thinking about the Geneva Club. Regarding Caesar, Prince, and Cuffee’s parody of white freemasonry, the most significant chapter of Gikandi’s book is subtitled ‘Mimicry and the Counterculture of Taste’.

Here Gikandi is interested in aesthetic responses to enslavement, more particularly in the way in which slaves reformulated hegemonic European forms in the performance of a counter-aesthetic.  One of his examples of such performances, the Caribbean festival of John Canoe, is very germane to our focus on the Geneva Club. Iterations of John Canoe in the eighteenth century involved West Indian slaves adopting English modes of dress, speech, and dance – a cultural appropriation not dissimilar to Cuffee, Caesar, and Prince’s adoption of freemasonry. Gikandi writes,

“John Canoe had two faces and functions: one imitated the culture of taste; the other mocked it…One face imitated the measured manners of the European court; the other face, which was notable for its hideousness, was a distortion of the symmetrical form of the accepted aesthetic.” (273)

Here Gikandi calls attention to the doubleness of John Canoe and the subversiveness inherent in its duality, at one and the same time imitative and mocking. John Canoe is “menacing” (273) in so far as its hideous face signals the unacknowledged side of the culture of taste, the hideousness of the Other against which culture is defined. Gikandi maintains that “in its menacing presence, John Canoe would mark black difference from the very culture that it was ostensibly imitating” (273). And so, we can perceive how John Canoe was “a field of play intended to clear a space of identity in the midst of its denial” (278). It is our contention that Caesar, Prince, and Cuffee achieved something similar in their double-faced imitation of white freemasonry.

Black difference and menacing doubleness are palpable in the New York Gazette’s satirical write-up of the Geneva Club in 1738.

Last Saturday Night was Discovered here a new Club, Lodge or Society of Free Masons (as they called themselves) being a Company of Blacks or Generation of Vipers assembled together to carry on their private and obscure Works of Darkness […] As a further Mark of Honour and Respect due to this Fraternity or black Guard, their two Masters were waited upon the Thursday following by two carts one after another…and were continually complimented with Snow Balls and Dirt, and at every Corner had fives Lashes with a Cowskin well laid on each of their naked black Backs, and then carried home to Gaol.

Doubleness is present in the way the slaves are defined dually both as ‘a new Club…of Free Masons’ and a “Generation of Vipers’. Although they have named themselves freemasons, Caesar, Cuffee and Prince are abjected by their blackness. As opposed to being worthy of honour, the black backs of the slaves are worthy of ‘Lashes’ and their rightful home is ‘Gaol’. Nevertheless, the need for the slaves to be whipped signifies the subversiveness of their mimicry. Moreover, white New Yorkers were not the only ones to enjoy the absurd mimicry of freemasonry, as can be seen from Cuffee’s gleeful quip, “Make Room for a Free Mason” (Lepore 102). As the critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes in The Signifying Monkey, his theorization of Afro-American literary criticism, “Free of the white person’s gaze, black people created their own unique vernacular structures and relished in the double play that these forms bore to white forms” (xxiv). The key terms here are relished and double play; Gates points to the pleasure which Cuffee seems to have gleaned from repeating white forms with a difference.

In the terms of José Esteban Muñoz, Caesar, Cuffee, and Prince’s performance is ‘disidentificatory’, meaning they work within the logic of the European culture of taste, as opposed to rejecting or identifying with it. Reformulating the hegemonic culture, the slaves repeated the white form of freemasonry with the signal difference of being black.  In the same way as the West Indian slave-celebrants of John Canoe, they performed a ‘disidentification’ by signalling black difference within the cultural logic of European colonialism. In the very moment when Cuffee was being most abjected (with the whip) for being a black body, he performed an acute disidentification, exclaiming ‘Make room for a free mason’.  In this way, the disidentificatory performance of the Geneva Club helped to recuperate existential freedom for the slaves. As Gikandi writes,

“in recognizing the space of play as a site of identity, the slaves were deploying the field of the aesthetic, of manners, of sense, and sensibility, from which they had been excluded by the ideologists of taste, to imagine an alternative way of being, detouring slavery and displacing the claim that they were mere objects.” (278)

All this shows how much can be gleaned from studying an act of everyday resistance. A richly complex submerged cultural world does indeed emerge, revealing Cuffee, Caesar and Prince as dynamic, complicated, multifaceted human beings – something which Horsmanden and the other prosecutors were unable to comprehend. By bringing the slaves into the foreground as protagonists in an ingenious countercultural performance as opposed to abjected criminalized slaves who were executed in 1741, perhaps spuriously, on a charge of conspiracy to rebel, we have experimented with an alternative mode of criticism. The rest of our project consists of other experiments in approaches to slave conspiracies, the first of which relates directly to the Geneva Club.

We contacted a Bay Area producer and rapper and invited him to respond musically and lyrically to the Geneva Club. He agreed and produced an interpretation in the form of a rap track, which we will showcase on our website. It is our contention hip-hop is a great medium with which to respond to the archive of the 1741 New York conspiracy; as a form of expression, hip-hop originated in the South Bronx in New York during the 1970s and gave voice to radically disempowered and misrepresented black citizens. Our Bay Area musician has given voice to the radically disempowered black citizens of 1738 New York, existing under the different conditions of slavery. Moreover, we felt that rap’s parodic bent and enjoyment of excess was very akin to the spirit of the Geneva Club.